TSA Screener Finds Blogger’s Vibrator, Orders Her to ‘Get Freak On’

Passengers at major airports can expect the Transportation Security Administration to take a snapshot of their naked bodies through their clothes — or, if they’d prefer, to be molested instead. Now they can also expect TSA to make juvenile comments about the contents of their luggage.

Well-known blogger Jill Filipovic (full disclosure: a pal) unpacked her suitcase this morning after a flight from Newark International Airport to Dublin, where she’ll be speaking to Trinity College students this week about abortion rights. She discovered that TSA agents turned a notice of inspection slip into a comment card. “GET YOUR FREAK ON GIRL,” it reads.

Why? In one sense, because Filpovic had packed a $15 vibrator. “Not even anything that freaky!” she emails Danger Room. But in another, more accurate sense, because this particular TSA employee knew he or she could make an anonymous and harassing comment free of reprisal.

“My first reaction was to laugh. Hard. And I’ve had that Missy Elliott song stuck in my head all day,” says Filipovic, a lawyer in her non-blogging hours. “Then I took a photo of it to email to four of my girlfriends who I figured would find it funny. And I threw it up on Twitter. But of course I also find it totally invasive and inappropriate, and the more I think about it the more horrified I am.”

Filipovic may laugh last, however. Her story has gone viral. After blogging and tweeting the TSA’s little comment, Forbes has written up her story, as has Gawker, and now us. Maybe now TSA feels as exposed as the rest of us.